Run Rabbit Run
Run Rabbit Run is the worst horror film on Netflix.
This movie throws you down the Rabbit Hole of Boredom and tosses you a shovel.
NNetflix has been losing its edge with some of its releases, but Run Rabbit Run is nearly as terrible as their attempt at bringing Cowboy Bebop to life. The story is as ludicrous as its sluggish pacing. Director Daina Reid chose a tempo that can only be described as wet cement drying in winter. The entire movie drags its feet like Kevin Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects. The worst part about this film is that it fails to horrify.
What kind of horror movie is not scary? This one. I hate horror films, unless it has a killer cast and story. Those two factors must be present for me to invest any amount of my mind. When they are absent, your scary movie is just a waste of time.
The rabbit mask…truly abysmal.
The plot is nonexistent. Mother Sarah has a daughter named Mia, and the two appear normal at the start of the film. That is until a most disturbing event befalls them…a rabbit wanders into their yard. Gasp! Shudder! No joke. A rabbit meanders into their yard, and Mia wants to keep it. Sarah obliges, but after a few glasses of red wine, attempts to huck it over the fence. The rabbit scratches Sarah on the hand, and she reluctantly keeps the animal. Mia, who was upstairs on the porch looking down at the time,walks away with some foreboding music trailing behind her.
The next morning, Mia wears a rabbit mask that she refuses to take off. Instead of ripping it off her head and chucking it in the bin, Sarah allows it. New age parenting will be the end of this world. Picking her up from school, Sarah learns that Mia has been having a rough time. Sarah later finds her in a playground pipe, knees to her chest, as she wallows in a pool of her own urine. Sarah takes her back home, and the weird kid dawns the rabbit mask, and Sarah hits another bottle of red wine. If this weren’t set in Australia, it could easily stand as a day in the life of an Orange County soccer mom. Sarah then informs Mia that they are to visit her mother, who has been ailing from dementia in a rest home. Sarah is estranged from her mother, but Mia is quite happy to go.
Mia and Sarah’s mother hit it off. The grandmother recognizes Mia as Alice, and Mia recognizes her even though they have never met. Mia insists on being called Alice from this point on, and Sarah is visually upset and takes her back home. The twist? Alice was Sarah’s sister who disappeared when the two were in grade school. The problem with this twist is that we do not learn this until nearly an hour into the film. The entire first two acts are spent hinting at this, but none of it is scary. There are no taught twists and turns of discovery by Sarah. A third of this film is watching actress Sarah Hook become increasingly freaked out over her daughter’s change in attitude. The suspense fails to land because it never left the ground in the first place.
The script is absolute garbage. The dialogue in Phantoms is poetry compared to Run Rabbit Run. Nothing of consequence happens, and the reason why anything happens at all is because a rabbit entered their yard. A seemingly inconsequential pet has somehow initiated a psychotic chain of events in a girl and her mother. What makes this worse is the rabbit isn’t evil…it’s just a freaking rabbit. Moving on. With Mia claiming to be Sarah’s long lost sister Alice, Sarah decides the best thing to do is stay at her childhood residence out in the country. Nothing wrong with that. Child is suffering catatonic fits whilst believing to be a dead sibling, and the logical thing to do is shack up in a creepy, isolated farm in the country. Totally normal and sane maneuver.
Actress Sarah Snook tried her best to bring her character to life.
Sarah finally works up the courage to explain to Mia that Alice was her sister who disappeared when she and her were children growing up on the very farm they are now staying at. Mia claims that she is no longer Mia, and that she is Alice. Naturally, this sends Sarah running for the merlot. Mia, who is now Alice, wears Alice’s old clothing and looks at the old pictures on the wall with reverence and delight. All while Sarah continues to fall to pieces. The only solution? More merlot. Another gallon of red wine later, and Sarah wakes up and drives to see her mother alone. We learn that Sarah’s mother blames Sarah for not watching Alice all those years ago when she disappeared. Sarah left her eight-year-old daughter alone in a farmhouse in the country, the very same farmhouse where her dead sister was last seen all those years ago. Abandon all logic ye who wrote this script.
Sarah goes back, and Mia is missing. Shocker. To make matters worse, the rabbit has returned! It doesn’t do anything. Aside from its freakish pink eyes, the rabbit never did anything but defend itself after Sarah attempted to chuck it over the fence that wine-fueled night. Moving on. So far, every scene lingers on the lack of action that sludges across the screen for two minutes too long. The amount of boredom I felt nearly killed me. I paused the movie and saw that there could not be more than ten minutes left in this atrocity. I soldiered on out of sheer, morbid curiosity. The twist was finally revealed. Sarah pushed her sister Alice off a cliff…she died. That’s it. I am not kidding. No reason and no rivalry are ever explained. Sarah admits to Mia what she did…over another glass of wine of course, and the two fall asleep on their bed.
Sarah wakes up, and Mia is missing…again. She looks outside the window and sees Alice holding hands with Mia as they walk towards the edge of the same cliff Sarah chucked Alice off all those years ago. Instead of chasing after them, Sarah screams and pounds her fist against the window. The girls look back at Sarah and continue their walk to the cliff’s edge, and the movie ends.
What a pile of unmitigated trash. The way I described the movie is how it takes place and it was the most disappointing hour and forty minutes I have ever endured. The movie is labeled as a horror thriller, and I was never once frightened or thrilled. If you are looking for a good scare, Run Rabbit Run is not it. The movie is a literal waste of time and should only be seen by those who have nothing to do with their lives and nowhere to go. As for the rabbit; neither Alice, nor Saraha ever owned one. The rabbit exists in this movie simply to accommodate its title…true garbage.